Nate Lawson

I founded SourceDNA, which scans
iOS & Android apps, performing in-depth similarity analysis on their code.

Previously, I founded
Root Labs,
a security consulting firm that provides design and
review services for companies designing new products.
Our main areas of focus are embedded and kernel security,
cryptography, and software protection.
I also write a blog on many of these same
topics.

I've been a FreeBSD committer since 2002. Initially, I wrote a SCSI target
emulator and contributed it since I had to write a similar module twice
previously for work. Then, my laptop didn't work very well with ACPI so
I took a look. As typically happens when you do that, I ended up becoming
the maintainer. It's a difficult subsystem since it includes the processor,
chipset, and all the BIOS. Also, there are too many BIOS bugs to work around.

We can learn a lot about modern copy protection by studying the past.
There was an intriguing arms race during the 1980's that is not
well-documented. This section documents protection methods and code
for analyzing them.